


The Underlying Logic of Things

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Limbo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-30
Updated: 2012-03-30
Packaged: 2017-11-02 18:05:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne arranges an expedition to limbo and Nash volunteers to go with her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Underlying Logic of Things

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted at the [kink meme](http://inception-kink.livejournal.com/19177.html?thread=44725481), but it was badly in need of a little editing. Honestly, it probably needs an entire re-writing, which I just don't have time for. So here it is cleaned up a little and orphaned instead.

“So you want to go on my doomed expedition?” Ariadne asks, and crosses her arms. And he is shocked that this is the girl that everyone in dreamshare is talking about in hushed whispers. Her head doesn’t even reach his shoulder. Nor does she look very imposing dressed in dark brown corduroys, a worn gray jacket, and a multicolored paisley scarf that might be made of silk. He wants to feel it—the scarf, that is—to see if it’s as smooth and cool as it looks or if it’s warmed by her skin, if it’s silk at all. 

“Yeah, sign me up,” he answers, since he made the decision long before he got to this point.

“No questions?”

“No.”

“I have a few,” her eyes are scrutinizing, looking him over like she sees all the composite of pieces that come together to make him work. He’s heard that she’s the best architect, that she can see the details of things like it’s her nature to know things, that she’s as mad as Cobb ever was.

For a hysterical moment he thinks that she’s going to ask him the standard job interview questions: ‘What would you say is your greatest weakness?’ or ‘Where do you see yourself going with this company?’ But he nods his assent, biting the inside of one cheek so hard that he imagines the not-quite-copper taste of blood.

“Have you been to limbo before?”

This one is easy, the very idea of limbo has always terrified him, so he can honestly answer: “No, never.”

“Good. What do I call you?” And she’s holding her tiny hand out to him, smiling winningly. He thinks that the rumors about her being insane must be based in fact.

He takes her hand, “Gabriel Nash.”

\--- 

That night he dreams for the first time in years on his own, without the aid of the PASIV device. The setting is the lush, green, and untouched lands of Peru or somewhere similar. Ariadne is there and dressed like a conquistador, wild-eyed in her too-large bowl-shaped helmet and bulky armor. She looks like she’s from that Werner Herzog film where they’re looking for the El Dorado. 

The one where everyone dies at the end. The one where they might as well not have existed at all.

“Who else is with me?” she asks in the dreamworld and Nash knows that she’s asking who is going to die with her, who is willing to lose himself with her, because that is the only way this story can end.

Words unbidden come from his mouth, written by Herzog and all the more incoherent and dreamlike in his own head: “That is no forest.”

“Come with me,” she says.

He wakes up too suddenly, sitting up with a rush of blood to the head, and drenched in his own sweat.

\---

Nash didn’t realize he was holding his breath until after he met the team and no one started shooting. After ducking Cobol’s long reach through a scrape of luck, he’d shaved his hair down to a bristle and laid low. Eventually, it seemed like no one was concerned enough to bother finding him.

That didn’t mean he ever wanted to see Arthur, Cobb, or that businessman—Saito—again. 

“I won’t be going under, my job is to watch over you as you sleep. If need be, I will wake you from here if too much time elapses.” This chemist’s words and sharp eyes belie his friendly manner. Nash finds that he would have liked to work with him in other circumstances.

Ariadne nods, “Thank you. We’re going to try to kick ourselves out this time, because we have better control that way. Try to hold off as long as you can.”

Once the chemist nods his assent, she turns to the rest of the team. “Geneviève,” the muscular woman who normally works as an extractor, Nash thinks, “I want you on the first level. We’re using musical cues. “Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’ is our signal.”

“Not Piaf?” asks the chemist, and there’s a detail here that eludes Nash, rankles against his brain. It’s like the scarf, he wants to feel it out with his fingers and feel its weight and texture, but it’s beyond his grasp.

“No. I think we’re trying for a different tone this time,” Ariadne answers. “This is my show this time. ‘Ascension’ is a cacophony of sound seemingly without pattern, but with a logic underlying it all. It’s beautiful, transcendent, hopeful.”

Geneviève, obviously disinterested in the music chosen, raises a hand almost like she’s asking for permission to speak, “What about the second and third levels?”

Ariadne gestures to the other member, “Michaels will take care of the second; Nash will take the third.”

That gets Nash’s attention. He asks, “You’re going into limbo alone?”

“Yes.”

“Take me with you.” The words are out of his mouth without a thought and Nash wants to physically grab them to pull them back. He knows there is nothing in limbo that he should want to see and a deep-seated fear grabs at his throat at the very thought. But he doesn’t take them back, can’t.

She looks at him, eyes dark and impenetrable, “Okay. We’ll need one more, in that case. Let me make some calls.”

\---

The next day another man has joined the group, but looks less than happy to be there. His hands are jammed in his pockets, shoulders slumped, and eyes narrowed. The first thing he says entering the door is: “This is a terrible idea, Ariadne.”

She touches his shoulder lightly and offers a smile, “It’ll be okay.”

Nash notices that despite the gentleness of her words, her eyes are eager. She wants nothing more than to plunge into the depths of her own subconscious—and he volunteered to go there with her.

This new guy is supposed to take Nash’s place on the third level, which means he and Ariadne will be in limbo alone. And completely dependent upon these other people to pull them out when the time comes, he supposes, unless there’s some ticket out of limbo from the inside. It’s probably a question he should ask, but he doesn’t.

The nervousness doesn’t bubble up in him again until the chemist is sliding the needle into the thin skin of his wrist. For just a moment, he can feel cold liquid entering the vein. “On to El Dorado,” he says, almost hysterical, and the man gives him a thoughtful look. 

The chemist does Ariadne next, murmuring a “take care” that sounds far too much like ‘farewell.’

\---

Nash wakes up in the first level—a hotel. No one got to see the layout except Ariadne, as far as he knows, and he almost literally itches to explore her mazes, examine her details, touch the walls of this so-called prodigy’s design. As a fellow architect, that is. It’s only professional curiosity.

Relying solely upon the inadequate information his eyes can give him, her lobby is gorgeously designed with sweeping arches and stately beauty.

Inanely, Nash wonders if this girl could ever mistake wool for polyester.

“C’mon,” she says and everyone follows. There’s no objective here except to find a place as out of the way possible from projections to allow them the necessary time. When they get to the fifth floor, they lay down in a neat row. He can feel the warmth radiating from her wrist next to him, almost touching but not quite.

Geneviève says, “Sweet dreams, guys.”

\---

The second level is even faster, a maze—literally, a labyrinth of worn concrete—with only the barest details. 

Michaels doesn’t wish them sweet dreams, but instead sends them to sleep with a grim smile. 

\---

The third level is harder and will last the longest time. The new guy is decked out in something like a military outfit. Well, they all are, but it looks ridiculous on everyone but him. Nash can’t place the nationality. Something European, not American, he thinks. Maybe British. He suspects a better architect would be able to identify it easily from the specific patches and rank.

“You can hold off the projections long enough?” Ariadne asks, all business.

The guy nods, “Of course. But, like I said, with or without you, I’m getting back topside, Ariadne.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

\---

They wake up, just the two of them, on a beach.

A city crumbles before them, falling into the ocean in desperate loneliness.

“Damn,” she murmurs.

He can’t help but ask, “What?”

“He’s a part of me. His limbo.” She sounds so terribly sad, so he takes her hand. She shakes him off. “I thought it might reset if he wasn’t here.”

She pauses, looking at the horizon angrily, determinedly. 

“Let’s go.”

He follows her through the city, which sometimes looks familiar and other times strange. He thinks he recognizes a building once in awhile, but the condition of them is so ruined by age and weather that he can’t tell.

They keep walking until they reach the end of the city. Unsurprisingly, it ends at a beach.

“That’s it? This is limbo?” It doesn’t seem right that this terrifying thing can appear so benign. It’s almost simple.

She smiles like he’s missed something important, then reaches out towards the water. There’s a bridge is in front of them. “No. That’s Cobb’s limbo. This is ours.”

\---

His feet hurt in an ache that spreads from his toes towards his heel.

The bridge has no end in sight. It is as long as the sky and he can’t help but wonder why—did Ariadne design it that way? Did limbo have regulations of spatiality all its own? 

The bridge isn’t like the bridges from where he grew up or it would resemble the Golden Gate or Bay Bridge. Instead, it seems something older, more regal. Maybe not unlike the pictures he’s seen of Brooklyn Bridge.

He wonders if the bridge was built from her mind, his mind, or some melding of both. 

And how intimate is it to build limbo together, an intertwining of the subconscious? It may even be closer than sex could bring two people.

“Gabriel,” she says, forcing him from his thoughts.

“What?”

“Why are you here?”

Nash says, “Isn’t it a little late to ask me that?” He runs his fingers along the brick of the bridge, feeling the realistic porousness, harsh under the tips of his fingers. The rough bumps of the surface grabs at his skin. Each brick is shaped in perfect imperfection, sloping into crevices and scars and crumbling bits.

_She_ must have built it then, his traitorous mind offers, because Nash knows that even as hard as it is for others to forgive you, it’s always harder to forgive yourself.

\---

“Why are you here?” she asks again, once they see the bridge’s end. If there were days here, several may have passed. Or not. It’s hard for him to say.

At the end of the bridge is a rainforest with mountains set behind.

This, Nash knows, he built. A shudder of dread takes hold of his neck, freezing him into place.

Ariadne turns on him, hand on her hip, “Answer me.”

“I’m here because you are. Because I wanted to see your limbo. I wanted to see you build.”

She frowns. “Why?”

But there’s really no answer he can give to that, so he shrugs.

\---

Ariadne takes the first step into the forest and leads the way. Feverishly, he dreads what else he could have subconsciously built here in this forest from his dream. Snippets from the dream flash fearfully across his eyes: men like ants on a hill, an arrow that is not an arrow, a whirlpool. But these things are fragments without meaning, fears as undefined as he feels waking.

“What happens when you die in limbo?” he asks, because he doesn’t know and because she is his leader.

“Depends.” She answers, but she doesn’t explain further.

They walk in silence after that, until he is brave enough to ask, once she is covered in mud from foot to thigh and laughing because he is too, “Why are _you_ here?”

Immediately, she face folds into seriousness, “Because I wanted to know.”

“Know what?”

“Everything.”

\---

They reach the mountain. 

Ariadne frowns, “There has to be more to limbo than this. Is this yours?”

“Mine?” He asks, but knows what she means.

“Do you recognize it?”

“No,” he lies.

Then we’re building completely from our subconscious. The Cobbs were building from memory, but—I think—also subconsciously. They woke up on a beach, that was subconscious. They built a city, mostly conscious. You see?”

“What the point?” he asks.

“Let’s climb.”

\---

They ascend, and he’s thankful for the shoes on his feet that separate him from the plodding path. He has no desire to touch the things that come from his own mind, vaguely terrified that he’ll reach out to touch dirt and it will have the consistency of slime, water, something worse.

Looking down from a ledge—far too high for his tastes—across the limbo he created he finally notices that it isn’t entirely his. Interspersed in the forest are temple-like structures of stone, beautiful and delicate.

And those are Ariadne’s, he knows with shocking certainty.

She walks to him, towards the edge, sliding a little on loose rocks. His hand shoots out without thinking, steadying her, so precariously close to the edge. She doesn’t shrug him off this time and she doesn’t move back from the precipice, so he holds her for his own comfort as much because he enjoys the solid feel of her jacket on his palm. 

Under his hand and standing at his side, she looks out over their limbo. “I was hoping for more.”

“What were you looking for?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find it next time.”

“I hope you do,” he says, and means it.

“Will you be coming again?”

“No.”

She doesn’t ask why, doesn’t even look at him, but he’s still touching her, a dream physical connection that only exists in this dream.

The confession trips off his tongue accidentally, “I used to work with Cobb.”

“I know,” she says. “I knew who you were all along; no one else would come with me so I brought you.”

This girl knows the texture and shape and feel and _rightness_ of everything so easily and he realizes that he only wants to know lines and boundaries of _her_ , wants to know how she's put together and how she could ever be replicated because she seems so impossible and enigmatic even now, this girl of so many layers—so he kisses her, gently, on the mouth.

But he feels the rightness of it only when she grabs his lapels and pulls him against her, the drag of sensitive skin on skin in this kiss with the wind sweeping up the cliff through their hair and clothing.

“I’m staying here,” he says when they break from each other. He didn’t realize it until he said it, but this _feels_ right as well. Maybe the question never was who was willing to die with her, but who was willing to die _for_ her, or for himself, or for this place. It's a tangle, but one that is better left untouched.

“I know that, too,” she says, as the first strains of jazz erratically burst across the forest. She smiles, a little sadly, and steps backwards off the cliff. The last he sees of her face is her hair sweeping up wildly over her eyes, her mouth still tilted into that quiet smile.

‘Ascension’ Ariadne had called it.

He stands at the edge, absorbing the sound and not feeling the rhythm or reason of it, but trusting that it’s there after all.


End file.
